But is is becoming the universal language of all humanity, thanks in large measure to the internet!
What tickled me is when Condi Rice spoke French while visiting there this week. Mainstream media like to quote how Jackie Kennedy won over Paris. Unfortunately, mainstream media refuses to acknowledge kudos to Condi Rice for the same thing.
English is the defacto language of prosperity and technology. I don't know why anyone would want to waste their time learning French. Plus, French makes you sound like a homo.
Where does that leave all the Mexicans here that refuse to learn and speak English.
It's a hard language to master, but an easy language to get your point across in. You can mangle it pretty badly and it's still intelligible.
Hey, if you are going to study a dead language, you might as well study Latin instead of French. ;-)
Bye bye French. Bye bye froggies. Not too sad to see you croak.
Dja tink it'll catch on here in America?
Everybody would be laughing so hard at what everyone else was saying, there would no longer be room for hate or discrimination or ickkyness towards others.
All those years learning Esperanto down the toilet.
English is indeed easy to learn to speak on a basic level which is what the author of the article said. The present-tense verbs are quite regular (compared to those in many other languages), and English has no gender for nouns. For very, very basic communication, the present tense is all that is required. It is quite easy for the average person to learn to speak some English.
Well, here in Southern California, Spanish seems to be on it's way to being the dominant language. Sigh.
I'm glad that the academic (feminist, etc.) efforts to push that weirdo, pinko Esperanto as a worldwide language failed ("tey" as a unisex pronoun and all of that).
Better tell that to the people who make ATM machines.....
Because it draws on so many other languages, English is an exceedingly rich and subtle language. By comparison, French is impoverished. I forget the exact numbers, but there are more than 10 or 20 times as many words in English as in French.
The Academie Francaise has always been exceedingly inflexible about adopting new words into the language, and the government has repeatedly clamped down on the import of English words, for instance. So French is all the more impoverished.
It is, of course, America that has done most to spread English, coming on top of the Victorian English empire which spread English into India and parts of Africa. American inventiveness, in particular, as well as military and economic importance, has assured that as new fields arise they will use English as their primary terminology.
The Internet has probably put the lid on it. Other languages can be found on the net, but unless you learn English you are confined to tiny ghettos on it.
If they think French is in free-fall now, just wait until Arabic replaces French as the national language of France!